"There is a price to be paid even for fellow-traveling with a racial identity as politicized and demanding as today's black identity. This identity wants to take over a greater proportion of the self than other racial identities do. It wants to have its collective truth—its defining ideas of grievance and protest—become personal truth.... These are the identity pressures that Barack Obama lives within. He is vulnerable to them because he has hungered for a transparent black identity much of his life. He needs to 'be black.' And this hunger—no matter how understandable it may be—means that he is not in a position to reject the political liberalism inherent in his racial identity. For Obama liberalism is blackness."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesColumnists from the United StatesAfrican AmericansPeople from ChicagoSociologists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
A Bound Man: Why We are Excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win (December 2007)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Shelby_Steele
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Shelby Steele
Shelby Steele (born 1 January 1946) is an American conservative writer and a fellow of the Hoover Institution. His columns and op-eds have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Harper's Magazine. In 1991 he won an Emmy, a Writers Guild award, and a San Francisco Film Festival award for his documentary, Seven Days in Bensonhurst. In 2004 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.
13 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Shelby Steele →
Related Quotes
"The Achilles’ heel of the left has been its dependence on menace for power. Think of all the things it can ask for in…"
"[T]he left, whose existence is threatened by the diminishment of racial oppression. The left’s unspoken terror is tha…"
"[T]he left gets power from fighting white evil, not black despair. Today’s left lacks worthy menaces to fight. It is …"
"[T]he left is still stalked by obsolescence. There is simply not enough menace to service its demands for power. The …"
"In the end, black power can claim no higher moral standing than white power. [...] No power can long insist on itself…"
"[W]hy are there no Martin Luther Kings around today? I think one reason is that there are no black leaders willing to…"
"[T]hough fear always seeks a thousand justifications, none is ever good enough, and the problems we run from only rem…"
"Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this…"
"The great ingenuity of interventions like affirmative action has not been that they give Americans a way to identify …"
"At every turn "world opinion," like a schoolmarm, takes offense and condemns Israel for yet another infraction of the…"